Top 5 Technologies in NFL Stadiums

As football fans around the world turn their attention toward the Miami Dolphins' Sun Life Stadium for Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday, Popular Mechanics looked at the other 30 NFL stadiums and found five that lead the league in innovation.

2100-inch HDTVs

2100-inch HDTVs

Dallas CowboysCowboys Stadium, Arlington, Texas

Everything's bigger in Texas, so they say, and far be it from colorful Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to ignore that cliché. His palatial new stadium, outside Dallas, embodies the Lone Star State's famous dictum, with the world's largest retractable roof, a capacity of over 100,000 and a $1.2 billion price tag that dwarf the competition around the NFL. But Jerryworld's signature outsize feature is a pair of the world's largest HDTVs that hang 90 feet above the field.

To build the $40 million screens, the Cowboys enlisted Mitsubishi Diamond Vision Systems, which produced two 2100-inch 1080p LED displays flanked by a pair of 700-inch TVs that face the end zones. The total video board structure weighs 600 tons, spans 60 yards and has five times the square footage of Diamond Vision's next-largest project, the screen at Atlanta's Turner Field. In the course of one game, the video board uses more energy than the average American consumes in four months.

Creating these HDTVs presented Diamond Vision with some challenges, beginning with the fact that "there's not an image processor available that can handle as many pixels that exist on that display," Mitsubishi's Dave Belding says. So each sideline-facing screen requires six processors carefully calibrated to sync up for a seamless image to appear on the board. Diamond Vision faced another hurdle in the manufacturing phase because of the sheer scale of the project. "There were times when every single one of our production lines were taken up with the Cowboys' display," Belding says.

Retractable Grass

Retractable Grass

Arizona Cardinals University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz.

After an Arizona Cardinals home game, soon after the fans exit the stadium, the field leaves too. While four NFL teams have retractable roofs--the University of Phoenix Stadium included--only the home of the Cardinals has a retractable field, which can roll in and out of the stadium to provide optimal growing conditions for the grass and to give added versatility to the venue.

The Cardinals' notion to install their departing lawn "began with the ownership's desire and belief that football should be played on natural grass," says Dennis Wellner, founding principal of the architecture firm Populous. The team also wanted a retractable roof to protect fans from the desert heat; however, "the opening in the roof would not be large enough for sunlight to fall on the field sufficiently so that the grass could remain healthy," Wellner says. By having a field that rolled out of the stadium to fully bask in sunlight, the Cardinals could have a retractable roof and natural grass.

The field is planted in a roughly 2-acre tray, which has 546 steel wheels rolling on 16 rail tracks installed flush with the stadium floor. Inside the 39-inch-deep tray there's an irrigation and drainage system that works both inside and outside of the stadium. When it's time for the field to leave, 76 1-hp motors roll it out in 75 minutes at a speed of 1/8 mph through a 200-foot-wide opening, where it stays in a cordoned area on the stadium's south side. And that's where the grass will be parked when the Venue hosts Wrestlemania XXVI on March 28, 2010.